Personal Stories and Psychotherapy
6.7 Formal Indication and the Therapist as Re-enactor
Regaining access to those contexts which lie behind the accounts presented by the patient implies two movements: (1) the grasping of content as an indication and (2) the retrieval of those experiences targeted through indication by means of their re-enactment.14
The first step in any word-based therapy is to start from what is being communi- cated—the content—and trace it back to those experiences which support it and to which the patient’s discourse is pointing: meaning, as prereflectively generated in
14 The third movement—the sense of reference—corresponds to the passion for healing.
6.7 Formal Indication and the Therapist as Re-enactor
its contextuality and within the framework of the implications through which it has taken shape. This implies a way of comporting oneself toward another person’s experience in order to grasp it in its happening—i.e., according to the ways in which a human being finds himself with respect to this or that concrete situation—and hence to retrieve the meaningful trajectories through which the person in question, and no one else, has found a position with respect to given events. What clearly emerges here is not just the positum of psychology—personal experience (ipseity)—
but also an indication as to how to access that prereflective and non-thematic dimen- sion, which can only be understood as a specific way of comporting oneself: a
“going with” the patient’s living appropriation of his past that enables one to grasp the very genesis of those experiences of the other that are still unspoken and unex- amined. To quote Dahlstrom (2001), “there is a prereflective manner of encounter- ing things, access to which is, nonetheless, possible in a reflection, indicating a foregoing self-disclosure of the manner of encounter (not be confused with some sort of inner self-awareness)” (p. 235).
The task of the therapist as the re-enactor of the experience under investigation, therefore, consists in determining the meanings of the patient by retrieving and executing tendencies that are faithful to the situation. Hence, it coincides with the disclosure of a context through which to grasp exactly what it means for the patient to be situated with respect to this or that event belonging to a given stage of his life—the period toward which the indication orients the person. So it is through the capacity to submit oneself to the patient’s plea by interpreting that which it points to that therapeutic care takes shape as something that the healer leads to, and provides, by relieving the suffering that the patient is unable to take care of himself. The prac- tice of therapeutic care therefore corresponds to a way of comporting oneself with respect to the meaning of the experience under scrutiny. It emerges as a specific way of grasping the other’s experience within the framework of a relationship that addresses the patient’s plea for help, through a passion for investigation and an interest in questioning him in accordance with the actual unfolding of circumstances.
Because it is only by re-enacting original, non-thematic experiences that these can be grasped and appropriated, this kind of inquiry cannot be guided by a priori principles. From this perspective the sense of a narrative, of an assertion, but also of a symptom, corresponds to a formal indication, which is to say, to a signal which is empty—i.e., merely formal—before it is re-enacted and which points to an original behavior, the meaning of which can only be retrieved by retracing it. This attitude rules out any theoretical slip, so to speak: any attempt to grasp experience through categories of meaning stripped of the assumptions, prejudices, context, and setting of the interpretation. Finding oneself in a given situation—the most basic fact of existence—always corresponds to an expression and manifestation of one’s mode of being oneself: it is in specific situations that, as it discloses itself pre- thematically, ipseity encounters itself with others in the world and together they come to manifes- tation. The one cannot be separated from the other.
Differently from the theoretical approach, formal indication becomes not an object fixed by the gaze of the mind, but a clue as to where to look, a disclosing of
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the way in which the meaning that subsequently trickled out, solidified, and finally faded in words, dimming in the symptom, actually originated. Precisely for this reason, formal indication cannot specify the object of its research but only point to it and provide a reconnaissance space while at the same time suggesting to the per- son seeking to understand it a certain direction and the need to follow it if he is to grasp its origin. Dahlstrom (1994), who calls this aspect of formal indication the reversing transformational function, emphasizes that the search for original mean- ings is not a form of contemplative reflection, but something that forces us to change our approach to experience, which by being reactualized and hence appropriated engenders a renovation of current sense.
This function acquires a key role in psychotherapy and constitutes the foundation of the study of personal stories. The analysis of the patient’s lived experience does not investigate the past in search of the remote causes (or imaginary traumas) of a chain of facts that may explain the person’s ongoing experience; less still does it search for the repetition of patterns that dissolve present experience in the regular recurrence of theoretical elements. Rather, what makes the analysis of lived experi- ence so crucial is precisely the task which it imposes: taking care of what has been significant in the patient’s personal story forces ipseity to take a position with respect to those lived experiences which are still a vital part of one’s own tenden- cies. The transformative function of word-based therapy, therefore, consists in the possibility to find a new orientation in one’s present life, by using the patient’s story to reactualize the meaningful perspectives it conceals. This movement forward is therefore also a movement of recovery which becomes a new movement forward, according to a generative circle which is nothing but a “re-grasping inclusion of previous interpretations” (GA 61 1985, p. 163) within the interpretative context that has been attained.
In keeping with an ancient hermeneutic principle, formal indication discloses the movement of the person’s interpretation according to a direction that goes from what is evident to what is obscure, unexamined, and unexpressed. Hermeneutics, which thus emerges as a counter-movement to the “natural” pull of the withdrawal of the experience of being alive, has to do with the recovery of those intimate ten- dencies and concealed motivations—tendencies that, once renewed via appropria- tion, contribute to lending shape to one’s existential perspectives. Indeed, it is only by re-enacting those experiences which had vanished behind words that the thera- pist—faithful to the situation under investigation—strives, together with the patient, to ensure that what is being formally indicated may be appropriated in its own terms. This co-retrieval of what was meaningful, and is still unspoken, inevitably changes the person who has turned in that direction by renewing his or her perspective.
In the light of this view, we can agree with Patočka’s conclusions with regard to the way in which temporality becomes time with respect to the future. Patočka (1988) argues that in order for this to happen—i.e., in order for temporality to become such in the light of the future—“what already exists (viz. the past) must no longer count as an authority which determines all possibilities; the condition (viz.
for temporality to become time with respect to the future) is the possibility of
6.7 Formal Indication and the Therapist as Re-enactor
non-being which, by emerging, sharpens one’s gaze as regards that which it is pos- sible and necessary to pursue” (p. 106).
As the experience to be understood has meaning in the original context of actu- alization for the person who lives it, and cannot be grasped “from the outside” or analyzed in the light of “what is simplest,” or indeed assimilated through an act of empathy toward one’s own experience, the experience must be articulated in such a way that its meaning will emerge according to the way in which it was originally had. The relation to the patient’s story must therefore be developed according to an understanding way of looking at things, or as an observing understanding of the other person’s experience, in agreement with its actual realization. This inevitably implies a retrieval of the original access to this experience, a retrieval which—as we have seen—corresponds to a way of approaching the other’s experience by attempt- ing to grasp it as it takes shape. The grasping of phenomena through formal indica- tion, then, is “nothing else than the explicit, factically genuine execution of a tendency that is faithful to a situation, a tendency that, while developed and acquired (in scientific research, knowledge), is implicitly there in the object at issue itself (factical life)” (PIA 171).
Before further investigating these fundamental questions, let us briefly return to the problem of method. If grasping another person’s experience means accessing the prereflective domain for the therapist, how can he retrieve the immediacy of sense, rediscover the way in which a situation originally presents itself to the person experiencing it, and regain this access?
The method of an a-theoretical science, and hence of a psychology based on it, should allow us to newly grasp and preserve the genuine self-showing of the prere- flective living experience. It was no doubt this problem which Natorp had in mind when denouncing the limits of reflective phenomenology, a problem which he unsuccessfully attempted to solve through the method of reconstruction. It is neces- sary, therefore, to specify in what way we grasp how each person experiences this or that situation, prereflectively. To achieve this, a method cannot be confined to the remote analysis of objectified life experiences.
A person’s relationship with his own story constantly takes shape through its actualization within the present contest. It is this relationship which must be exam- ined in order to bring to light those lived experiences which prevent the patient from grasping his own history and, more generally, prevent his present ipseity from gain- ing full possession of itself and of renewing itself. To grasp experience as it takes shape, it is necessary to reactualize it by “going along with” the enactment of the other person’s lived experience according to its proper meaning, which is to say, according to its sense of enactment. In such a way, we can explicate sense without destroying it, in “sympathy” with its flow. However, this is not enough, because in order to actually grasp the full experience of a self, it is first of all necessary to grasp how concrete ipseity encounters (or does not encounter) the domain of the proper.
Therefore, the therapist’s interpretative involvement in the enactment of another person’s lived experience coincides with the bringing to light of this person’s expe- rience, according to the distinctive sense possessed by a given experience within the coherent framework of his life. The therapist’s interpretative involvement, in other
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words, takes shape in keeping with the constitution of the patient’s experience. An explicating understanding of this sort coincides with the experience of a living expe- rience. In order to remain such, it constantly strives to keep to the original experi- ence, a-theoretically. As any theoretical stance engenders a reflective domain, and thereby transforms the other person’s experience into reflected-lived experience, it no longer grasps experience in its immediacy but only observes it.
Therefore, not just for the explicative method of the natural sciences but also for that of descriptive reflection (developed by Husserlian phenomenology), it is impos- sible to disclose the domain of the immediacy of lived experience. Von Herrmann is right to stress the fact that, unlike the theoretical approach, “hermeneutical seeing and understanding does not modify the lived-experiences in lifting them out of the living enactment of lived-experience … instead, in going-along with the immediate living-experience, it shifts it from pre-phenomenological unexpressedness into phe- nomenological explicitness. Only in this way does hermeneutic understanding not deprive lived-experiences of their own character; rather, it preserves that character in order to reveal it as such” (2013, p. 79).
It is evident that the kind of interpretative understanding which is faithfully directed toward living experience, as this actually manifests itself to a person, with- out any theoretical mediation, corresponds to the first methodological principle of phenomenology: the return to things themselves, as these appear in themselves. The question of the access to life itself, and of a method capable of ensuring the scien- tific rigor of the study of the prereflective sphere without entailing any form of reflection, is the direction which the young Heidegger derived from life and pre- sented to phenomenology. Heidegger starts by elucidating the concrete situation of access and through a deconstructive retrieval of the original sources of meaning seeks to record the conditions for the emergence of those categories through which life is understood in its hidden motives, tendencies, and unexpressed explanatory paths (GA 58 1992).
As we have seen, reverting to the sphere in question implies not the direct grasp- ing of lived experience as though this were an object of sensory experience, but rather the deconstruction of the overall context of references, which has produced the explicative direction fixed through the narrative (Destruktion) and its recompo- sition, as a direction that is determined by partaking of the vitality of experience according to its flow. In this respect, the past discloses itself, or becomes foreign to us, in the light of the capacity we have to access it in the present, because it is the concrete situation of living that brings out the motives leading us to engage with our own history, to regain familiarity with ourselves.
Phenomenology thus repeats the original familiarity of life, bringing it to mani- festation. Just as hermeneutic phenomenology is an a-theoretical science capable of making the domain of lived experience visible in itself, phenomenological psycho- therapy retraces the genesis of configurations of sense, by retrieving the story of their production by a specific individual over the course of his or her existence.
Unlike in phenomenology, the genesis of sense which is the focus of phenome- nological psychology always concerns a well-defined sense, a particular history, a unique life, and a positum. The interpretation of concrete life—and hence its
6.7 Formal Indication and the Therapist as Re-enactor
narrative explication—is therefore bound to revolve around categories that articu- late the way in which the life in question already understands itself in actual con- texts, in ongoing situations. The narrative investigation of factical experience brings to light and stabilizes that experiential context which the constant slipping from one situation to the next, from one context to the next, which characterizes our concrete life, prevents us from articulating. As noted by Ricoeur, through the act of plotting, the succession of events that make up the story are gathered into a constellation (the narrative plot) which more or less successfully expresses the overall contextuality of unarticulated references, which are an integral part of the experience made by the person, lending them a new unitary configuration and a renewed intelligibility.
Retracing one’s life does not mean reflecting on it as though it were the object of a preestablished form of knowledge; rather, it means borrowing meanings from it—
so to speak—in order to verbally express them. Thus, for instance, a present prob- lem will open a window into the past, indicating a direction of sense which is to be re- enacted starting from the situation under scrutiny, so as to grasp that specific sphere of life in which it took shape. In this respect, the different themes character- izing the successive periods in a person’s life represent contexts of sense that must be newly explored starting from the situation under investigation. In this movement, performed together with the therapist, what is already mine—as the experience of my own life—becomes genuinely my own through the narrative appropriation of my still unarticulated experience. The linguistic expression which is grafted upon a person’s suffering and acting verbally conveys the person’s experience of living and reverts to it, according to a constitutive circularity between intuition and expression and understanding and interpretation.
What also takes shape within this domain is a destructive or deconstructive pro- cess that consists in finding a way to access the origin of experience in its tendencies and motivations: phenomenology must be capable of grasping experience as it takes shape.
This is precisely the insight reached by the young Heidegger, and it is in the light of it that we are to understand his response to Rickert’s criticism that the Lebenphilosophie was incapable of distinguishing between living life and thinking about it. Heidegger realized that phenomenological practice consists in “going along with” (Mitgehen) lived experiences, as a repetition of life: that it is not a reliv- ing, but a categorial research in which life’s re-collectability (Wieder-holbarkeit)
“simultaneously brings its evidence to fruition” (GA 61 1985, p. 88, quoted in Crowell p. 125).
It is difficult to understand how this phenomenological mode of partaking of the vitality of experience—by going along with its flow—may be subsumed within the broader notion of reflection, as suggested by Crowell (2001) and Zahavi (2003).
This is especially true if we understand the term in question as the mode of grasping phenomena typical of theoretical experience. “With reflection we adopt a theoreti- cal attitude,” the young Heidegger writes—meaning that what was merely a lived experience becomes a lived-observed experience with reflection (GA 56–57 1999, p. 178). The risk is therefore to “equate the intuitive phenomenological view with the intuition of objects” (p. 237). What emerges here is a significant difference
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compared to Husserlian phenomenology. According to Husserl, the meaningfulness of a given object is given together with its sensory perception (as a sort of excess).
Hence, being must be given and must be given as the object of an intentional con- sciousness. This phenomenology thus takes the shape of a science of acts of con- sciousness, which evidently is not concerned with the question of what makes it possible to grasp the being of a thing as an intelligible meaning—i.e., of how that giveness (being) of the thing is itself given.
This problem of conflating phenomenological intuition with the intuition of objects is all the more acutely felt in Husserl’s phenomenology because the fact of turning toward the essence (genus, species, individual) makes phenomenological intuition coincide “with the grasping of relations of order” (GA 58 1992, p. 240), which amounts to the intuition of an object.
The distinction between reflective phenomenology and hermeneutical phenom- enology, therefore, does not concern—and hence does not rest upon—the method- ological use of reflection, as Zahavi argues; rather, it implies a particular way of grasping living experience, which cannot be understood if it is grasped according to the theoretical mode of accessing things.15
Clearly, if ipseity is envisaged as something other than a thing, then the sense of being this ipseity cannot be an object of knowledge. The defining feature of the rela- tion with oneself which distinguishes ipseity is the fact that ipseity can only relate to itself by enacting existential possibilities. Hence, it would be more appropriate to speak not of reflection but of refraction—a refraction which is constantly taking shape. As stressed by Patočka (1988) “the primary form of this relation is not an orientation toward the object, but the practical grasping of a given possibility … it is a reflection clearly guided by an idea of being which amounts entirely to its praxis” (p. 93—see too Patočka 1998 lecture 12).
6.8 The Therapeutic Approach to the Other’s Relation